Let’s play fill in the blank. Take the sentence: “Wow, look at that! He’s using a(n) ______ on that ice carving!” What sort of tool most often fills in the blank? I’m sure you already know my answer from the title of this entry, but odds are, had you asked me that, say 18 years ago, I would have said “That’s easy: a chainsaw!” Now, of course, I’d say “an iron.”

I think for a variety of reasons, onlookers are frequently surprised that I use something as simple as a regular household iron on my sculptures. I think they expect tools for an “exotic” art to be exotic as well and I think they’re surprised that they have one of the tools at home in their laundry room. They’ll ask what I’m using it for and my standard answer is that I’m “getting the wrinkles out,” but I may be using it to flatten a surface, get rid of some surface cloudiness, or just trying to warm the ice up before the event starts. Sometimes, they’ll say something about the water/electricity thing, perhaps forgetting that most irons are designed to hold water for steam.

Aside from using an iron for cleaning up a sculpture surface, carvers will also often use one or more to warm up aluminum plate for welding. For this reason, it’s best to find an iron that doesn’t have the auto-shutoff feature. However, I’d be lying if I said that I’d never melted something by accident because I left the iron in the wrong spot or it fell over when I wasn’t paying attention. Be careful!

In a pinch, an iron can be used in place of aluminum for small welds. In my “get outside the block” video, for example, I use an iron to weld on the angel’s outstretched arm. To do something like this, I’d probably plug in the iron for a few seconds so that it warms up, but then unplug it before I use it on the weld surfaces. You just want to flatten and perfect the surfaces, not melt them down. Also, keep the iron moving because they heat unevenly, particularly around the steam holes.

Because you don’t even want the auto-shutoff feature, the cheapest iron you can find will usually do the trick. I go to Walmart or Target and generally spend $6-7 per iron. They take a beating and seem to fail just when you really need them, so I buy at least a couple at a time and keep backups around.

Finally, let’s say you want to iron a really small or hard-to-get-to part of your sculpture. You could use what’s called a hobby iron, which is basically a small iron on the end of a handle. Or you could use a tiny little iron called a Clover mini-iron. Its heat surface is probably less than an inch wide and is also attached to a long handle. You wouldn’t use either of these smaller versions for everyday carving, but they could be useful for special situations.

You might also find photos and info from this entry on the ice carving secrets facebook page and you can comment there as well as below. Thanks!

Tags: iron, aluminum welding method